Failure to properly secure one's private property does not make it legal for someone else to access it.

Ummm... You put your furniture on the curb or your trash, then accuse someone for stealing it? If it's private it shouldn't be on the curb. Anything on the curb is considered public. Clicking a picture of anything on your curb is also considered public. If you wanted to keep it a secret, you should have bought a box and kept it in the locker.

Edit: after few days you realize that the trash on your curb shouldn't have been there. Then you raid the trash company because your brother is a cop.

Sorry- I edited. What I’m saying is that the server represents its owner, so when the server grants someone access in normal operation it’s not intrusion.

Servers don't grant access. People grant access. People can make mistakes and set up servers to mistakenly allow access to things.

Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.

> Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.

This is a non-sequitur, nobody is saying anything about anyone's property rights being revoked.

The teen asked for access, and the content owners, via the permissions they had configured, granted it. Sure they can later decide that this was a mistake, but that doesn't make it theft for the teen to have asked for access.

Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.

They made a mistake when configuring their web server. It's obvious that this was a mistake because some of the documents contained private information from Canadian citizens.

> They made a mistake when configuring their web server. It's obvious that this was a mistake because some of the documents contained private information from Canadian citizens.

Per the tech article, it was an open archive of public documents that the government published periodically. The reasonable assumption is that the files were all public, and there's no reason to suspect the teenager in this case thought otherwise. The fact that ~3% of the files weren't properly redacted (whatever that means) is hardly "obvious".

> Making a mistake doesn't revoke someone's property rights.

Let's keep things constructive please.

Except they’ve been given access. The server should represent its owners in its sharing of data.

Failure to properly secure one's private property does not make it legal for someone else to access it.

It doesn't matter if we're talking about physical property in the real world or virtual property on a server.

It does if that other person has a reasonable expectation that you intended for it to be public.

Leaving your property on the curb is a good example. If someone takes it, you would be hard pressed to get it back from a legal standpoint.

This is very similar. The government left all those documents on the curb.

Putting it out on the curb with a "FREE INFORMATION" sign, however, does. And this kid is being thrown under the bus for taking it all because it was on a site labeled FREE INFORMATION.